Let’s be clear. Facebook isn’t ‘over’ any more than Google is. Facebook dominates our online world and is here to stay. What IS over I hope are attempts to force Facebook into an ‘old media’ model by agencies and ad men who don’t really get it (and even Facebook execs are guilty of this).

Facebook still offers unparalleled opportunities for brands, but not in the buying of banner ads and sponsored statuses. Here are 5 reasons brands don’t need to PAY to advertise on Facebook:

1. Advertising on Facebook is free if your marketing content is interesting enough.

Mark Zuckerberg created an online world where any brand, regardless of ad budget, has an equal chance to be heard. If you have authentic, interesting great marketing content you don’t need to pay to disseminate it. Set-up a brand page and start telling your story.

2. If you create compelling content that can go viral you don’t need any paid ad spend behind it.

Sure you can pay to ‘boost’ your content with paid ads. But if your content is compelling enough you don’t need to. Look at YouTube – the most viral and highest rated videos aren’t created by the worlds top TV or ad directors, they’re very often low budget, frequently low quality and created by an individual. But they tell a story and they grip imagination and attention. If you can do that for your brand you don’t need deep pockets or big bucks.

3. Your best advertisers are not ad men and copywriters but enthused passionate, authentic, advocates of your brand. Find them and amplify their voices, not yours.

How long do you think brands take briefing new ad teams on their brands? Getting them under the ‘skin’ of their consumers and telling them what their customers think, through focus groups, research and extensive briefings ? All so their ad messaging is ‘authentic’ and ‘speaks the language’ of the consumer. On social networks you don’t need to talk TO the consumer, you need to let the consumer TALK. Find your biggest fans and let them be your ad team – they’re a lot cheaper.

4. Social media can NOT be treated the same way as ‘old media’, entirely different rules apply. Anyone who tells you differently doesn’t ‘get’ social media.

This is not just about Facebook. It’s about all social media. Brands have got to stop trying to fit social into a TV or print, broadcast, mould. It’s not the same medium and they can’t use the same message. Cut the banner ads and the featured tweets and use each platform’s strengths. Encourage your brand advocates to campaign FOR you.

5. The world has changed, broadcast marketing, controlled by brands’ heavy ad spends and ‘one-way’ messaging, has hugely decreased in effectiveness. Facebook offers a never-before-seen opportunity to get directly to consumers & find out what they’re thinking/saying/doing.

Tear up the advertising bibles and your ad spend schedule and spend your time listening instead of talking online. It’s harder work, it takes different skills and it’s not as nice and simple as handing over a media budget to a 3rd party but it WORKS.

All this begs the question, how will Facebook make money if agencies like mine are encouraging brands away from paid ad spend and focusing them on creating compelling content and empowering brand advocates?

I’m glad to say that’s not my problem. All I do know is that Facebook and the myriad other social platforms aren’t ‘dead’ because big brands have found out paid advertising on them just isn’t effective. They’re here to stay and they undoubtedly WILL crack the thorny ‘monetisation’ issue and unlock a revenue stream. Paid advertising just isn’t ‘it’.

5 reasons brands don’t need to advertise on Facebook is a post from: Tamar

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When explaining the appeal of the ‘Reach Generator, Facebook bandied around a number of figures claiming to highlight how poor the visbility of your content currently was – with 12% (or there abouts) being quoted as the percentage of people who COULD see your brand page status update who actually WOULD see it. All very well and good, and a classic example of the “Freemium” model. In other words, give them the basic service for free and then charge them for extra add-ons at a premium.

Fast-forward to the start of May and the Reach Generator feature hasn’t yet been fully released – but Facebook are already testing a non-brand version, for all of us “regular” users. “That’s a bit odd”, I found myself saying – why would people want to do that?

The feature is currently being referred to as ‘Highlight‘, and appears to be being tested by a small selection of users – possibly most of whom are in New Zealand. Two different versions are currently being tested, one of which you can pay for, and one which alllows you to highlight your stories for free – presumably with the aim of actually testing whether anyone is prepared to pay for this functionality.

The fact that the same small percentage claim is being used to ‘sell’ this feature struck me as more than a little odd, and I can’t be the only one? I’ve got about 600 friends on Facebook and I’m PRETTY confident my statuses are seen by more than 12% of them – though I understand enough about Edgerank to also appreciate that there are obviously people who won’t see my statuses, based on their proximity to me, a lack of interaction or even just the fact that we’re not very well connected.

All of which begs the question: If Edgerank is supposedly clever enough to assess my friendships with people, surely allowing me to pay to over-ride this will just result in me pissing off my friends? Does the presence of an “over-ride” option not call the usefulness of EdgeRank in to question?

As you’d expect, the (test) launch of this ‘Highlight’ feature has attracted a lot of debate in the comments sections, with a lot of people claiming the feature will be mis-used by people who want to spam your feeds, or promote statuses which pester people in to doing something. Whilst I don’t necessarily agree with that point (if you’re friends with people who might spam you, that’s your own fault and you can easily fix it!) I DO question why anybody would actually pay to do this?

Worse still, the concept of highlighting your content to make it more visible will make this mythical 12% debate a lot more prevalent – and presumably lead people to question how effective Facebook actually IS a ‘free’ marketing tool? Discussions about EdgeRank have long suggested there are a lot of ways you can ‘optimise’ your content to make it more visible – does this 12% figure contradict that, is it a cap imposed by Facebook, or simply an ‘on average’ figure we shouldn’t worry too much about?

One thing’s for sure – it’s clearly another effort by Facebook to open up another revenue stream with their IPO looming. Whether it ends up being a successful one or not remains to be seen…

Facebook ‘Highlight’ – what’s the point and will anybody actually use it? is a post from: Tamar

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We’re very keen as an agency to support our national team and we hope the infographics series will help spread information about the team in an exciting visual way that will encourage the whole nation to get behind them.

The first in the series “Behind TeamGB”, published today, concentrates on the history of the team, the support behind them and where GB currently stands in the all-time Olympics medals table.

The second “Meet the Team” will be published when the last of the 550 athletes is selected in July and will introduce you to the men and women who will represent us at London 2012.

The third and last infographic will be published after the closing ceremony of the Games and will showcase our national team’s medal success.

I hope everyone will enjoy and share the infographic series and will get behind TeamGB!

Tamar help TeamGB with launch of infographic series is a post from: Tamar

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Google last week announced its latest webspam update – called the “penguin update”. This update, as explained by the Google Webmasters Blog is aimed at removing spam sites from the ranking and punish the sites adopting black hat SEO techniques. The blog, by Matt Cutts, underlined some basic principles that a website should adhere to in order to keep its rankings higher.

1. Do not create hidden links or hidden text
2. Do not use unauthorised tools to send queries to Google or do automated submissions
3. Do not use cloaking (at all)
4. Do not duplicate content
5. Do not create ‘doorway ‘pages, sub domains or domains solely for search engines.
6. Do not create pages with viruses, trojans or malware behaviour.

Soon after the update was implemented many sites lost their rankings – some of them completely vanished from the rankings. Google was also criticised a lot for penalising authentic sites and showing irrelevant results in rankings. One of the funniest examples of the update faux-pas was pointed out in the comments on Google’s announcement of the webspam algorithm change:

“Joseph said…

Anyone who’s looking at the results rather than what Google claims will know this did nothing to help webspam. For instance #10 for “make money online” …
makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com
I’ve seen countless more examples of minimal content pages ranking now. I guess that’s one way to get around the “over-optimization” filters … just don’t have anything on your site to optimize!

The comment was posted after encountering a blank blogpost on page one for keyword “make money online”.

The criticisms of the update even resulted in a petition against the Google Penguin Update. Maybe Google too realised that Penguin was not as successful as Panda – later that day Matt Cutts was seen tweeting companies, asking them to give their feedback on Penguin, reminding them that if someone wants to report spam that Google missed, they can send the feedback to Google. It clearly shows Google is not very sure of Penguin as yet and is looking to improve it further.

Whatever Google’s plans for further updates are, Penguin has definitely given its winners and losers, and it seems there are still more surprises to come. So, it’s better to give your SEO techniques a second check and make sure they are strong enough to stand against… THE PENGUIN! . The trick is simple – as always said by Google “Create Content for Users Not Search Engines, Links Will Come Naturally”, just what we believe here at Tamar – NATURAL IS THE BEST!

Pandas, Penguins and Penalties – Oh my! is a post from: Tamar

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1. foursquare - the location-based social network which has just topped 20 million users with over 20 billion check-ins could be the next hottest candidate for either a Facebook or Google buy out. There’s clearly a massive user base, which has previously gained Foursquare a big partnership opportunity with American Express and other big brands.
2. Path – this up and coming ‘life-sharing’ smartphone app is said to have one of the best designed user interfaces for smooth social content creation. The intuitive way of journal-ing one’s day is what it’s all about. Google are more likely to have their eyes on this one, especially since it could be a good idea to integrate with Google+ for the ‘Google Glass’ project.
3. Viddy – the video answer to Instagram. Viddy has been popping up in articles all over the web. Users can simply capture and edit mini movies of everyday moments which can then be shared with family and friends via Facebook. As integration exists already, Facebook would probably be the best bet to claim this app.
4. Tumblr - Google would easily be able to cease the opportunity of monetising this blogging platform with advertisements whilst convincing currently active Tumblr users to join Google+.
5. Spotify – the ultimate social world of music service this startup has already teamed up with Facebook. Google may also want their hands on Spotify seeing as the concept of providing a popular music sharing service only gives another reason for users to stay loyal to a social network.
6. StumbleUpon – the discovery engine that feeds people with information and lets them explore the greatest source of knowledge aka the Internet. This startup delivers traffic to websites without any copyright problems and also happens to be one of the leading social networks out there. Why wouldn’t this spark up potential acquisition by Google, Facebook, Twitter or even Apple?
7. Thisismyjam – just like Spotify, is another online music sharing service which encourages you to share the song that you cannot seem to get out of your head via Facebook and Twitter. With that in mind, we’re guessing either Facebook and Twitter will want to keep this all to themselves, but let’s face it, Google could potentially pluck this one off of them if they really wanted to.
8. Square – credit card payments at its finest! This revolutionary card reader app makes business convenient by directly turning iOS devices into a register. Paypal would be the obvious choice to acquire Square but then again, Google may secretly want in on this one too.
9. Cinemagr.am – simple gif creation app that turns photographs into shareable animations. This is climbing up the app charts –  and fast. Facebook, Twitter and Google need to watch out for this one. We could have a winner.
10. Three startups with an equal chance that broke out at this year’s SXSW are Highlight, Sonar and Glancee. All three mobile apps are based on sharing a user’s location and offering the opportunity to learn about a stranger nearby after checking out his/her profile. Think Foursquare meets Match.com.

And what about Pinterest? With the network attracting huge levels of online attention and getting users hooked on pinning for hours, Pinterest is potentially on the road to becoming a social Goliath itself. Chances are, it probably won’t sell out without serious investment. Only time will tell.

Why not let us know who you think could be next to face Facebook’s acquisition trail?

The Top 10 start-ups next on Mark Zuckerberg’s shopping list? is a post from: Tamar

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Just a drop in the ocean…

There are some things in life that are inevitable – and I don’t just mean death and taxes. For instance, whenever we get cold weather in April, or hot weather in winter, some joker will invariably start bandying around the old “Whatever happened to global warming?” cliche. And just as surely as that happens, a British hose-pipe ban usually results in torrential rainstorms – once again forcing jokers everywhere to quip about how useless the British weather/government/whatever is as a result.

Well thankfully for those of us who like a chuckle, this year’s hose-pipe ban has been supported by an expensive marketing campaign, which has included a load of billboards telling us how bad the drought situation is – which naturally gives rise to a lot of opportunity for comedy shots of rain-sodden high-streets featuring the poster. So far the banter has been limited to Twitter, but we’re keeping our eyes peeled for the inevitable photos of the “We are in drought” poster lying in a puddle…

QR = Quite Ridiculous

These have been doing the rounds for a while now, but as we’ve been away for a few weeks it seemed appropriate to remind you all of them – some of the best (or worst) examples of bad QR code usage. Good old “we’ll write a story about anything, particularly if it’s trending” Mashable did a good piece on it, as did Business Insider… as did this blog.

You get the picture – everyone’s doing it (both failing and writing blogs about it…!) – so we’ll save you the trouble of reprinting them all here, as you can read them all perfectly easily. Here’s our favourite though:

It’s the real(ly permanent) thing

Marketing behemoths Coca Cola found themselves in hot water recently, when an agency helping them to promote their wares in New Orleans made a bit of a cock-up.

According to the story, street artists were contacted via Craigslist, with various different offers being made in exchange for helping the drinks company to “spray paint” adverts on the sidewalks in various parts of the city. The only slight hiccup here? The city had not granted permission for the ads – and indeed the posts on CraigsList implied that they were very aware of this.

A lot of residents got quite upset with the ads, most of which had to be treated with chemical spray to remove them. Naturally Coca Cola were quick to distance themselves from the agency, claiming they “misinterpreted our permit” – but there were red-faces all round… Nice, bright, Coca Cola red I imagine!

Tamar’s Friday #FailureToLaunch #18 – Still Failing after all this time is a post from: Tamar

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By “invest” I don’t necessarily mean in the traditional “buy it” form – though of course there are ways of doing that. But whether you choose to invest time, energy, money or just focus on your content, it’s something that you’ve got to do – not just for your SEO (though that’s the main angle I’m focusing on here) but also for your customers and users.

So, with that in mind, here’s 10 reasons for you – not all of them will apply to everyone, but if you’re working for/with a brand right now, I guarantee that at least 5 of them will be relevant to you…

1. Good content converts

Investing in great content about your products or services will naturally help to sell them – unless you’re selling Coca Cola or something REALLY obvious, people will want to know more about what your product involves. Well-written content can help them to understand this, without the need for them to look elsewhere – or worse, go to your competitors. The more you can help them to understand at the touch of a button, the less research they’ll need to do. Of course, good onsite usability and conversion is crucial here too, but we’ll save that for another post.

2. Content conveys professionalism

There’s nothing worse than getting to a website you think is “the one for you” and finding their content is sloppy, unprofessional or riddled with errors. Or worse still – they don’t have any at all! Content helps to convey how professional and up-standing your brand is, so unless that’s not a priority for you, you need to make sure your content is up-to-scratch.

3. Good content rewards customers

As well as conveying your professionalism, good content acts as a reward to your customers and potential customers, telling them that you value their time and their business. Unless you’re in the “Use them and lose them” category of products, you’ll most likely have repeat business in the back of your mind at all times – good content is crucial if you want people to come back to your site time and again.

4. Good content encourages engagement

As the worlds of social media and search become ever-more intertwined, the need to engage your users onsite has become a must. Well-produced and interesting content encourages engagement – though obviously there are techniques within the content that help this even further. But as a rule, the better your content (and cues), the more people will want to engage with you. Whether that engagement is through conversation, or a social “follow”, or even just a “Like”, almost all engagement ultimately helps with your other aims in the long run.

5. Intelligent content attracts customers

A lot of websites seem to take the (short-sighted) view that using content is all about getting people to your site, and forget that it’s actually your greatest sales tool once you have them their. Creating spammy or poor-quality content for SEO is ultimately cutting off your nose to spite your face – nobody is going to buy your quality product if you’ve got them their through underhand techniques, particularly if they’re faced with a page of rubbish when they get there.

6. Great content attracts search engines

Whilst I didn’t want to make the focus of this post overall “Great content is great for SEO”, the two are quite clearly intrinsically linked – now more-so than ever. With Google’s Panda updates making that very obvious, the need to produce well-written and well-optimised content should be one of your highest priorities in SEO – though my rule of thumb with “SEO Content” has always been “put the user first” – and it’s worked out well for us so far.

7. Well-written content increases time-on-site

Producing content that people actually want to READ (or watch, or use) as opposed to just using it as a “trick” to get them to your site is crucial if you want people to spend TIME on your site. Site “stickiness” naturally increases the amount of time you have to sell to your customers – whether that’s increasing their understanding of your products, of your brand/ethos or just tell them more about your range, keeping them on site for longer will inevitably lead to better interactions in the long run.

8. Content increases your authority

As with my SEO comments above, Google are clearly keen to reward sites’ “Authority” on topics – and what better way to demonstrate that you’re an authority on a subject or topic. Utilise your content to demonstrate this authority and you’ll not only being increasing Google’s opinion of you, it’ll also carry across to your customers too.

9. Content doesn’t just mean WORDS

I’ve tried to avoid focusing too much on “content” which is specifically WORD based (most of the above applies across all content types) but it’s worth stressing that point here: Great content doesn’t just mean text – it can very imagery, videos, audio, discussions, data or any number of other types of media. As the old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words” – though I can’t guarantee they were talking about SEO when they said that…!

10. Content shouldn’t be hard to produce

If you find yourself struggling to produce content, you’re probably not doing it right – or at least not thinking laterally about what you could say. You know your brand and products best, so if you don’t know what to say about them, who will? Having said that, there are always ways to get round a bit of “Writer’s block” – a simple search on your competitors is always useful for a bit of inspiration, as is a trawl of relevant industry blogs or forums. And if all else fails, why not utilise your customers to help you product good content? You never know, they might even enjoy it…!

10 reasons you should invest in good content is a post from: Tamar

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At Tamar our mission is to create digital brand legends, amplifying the power of consumers who don’t merely ‘like’ brands, but truly ‘love’ them. With Facebook’s implementation of the engagement-driven open graph, it’s important for brands to be loved, now more than ever before. It’s no longer good enough, if it ever was, to simply build thousands of ‘likes – high levels of engagement are key for visibility and influence across social media platforms. Furthermore, with digital comes international and those who make their presences known globally and engage with worldwide audiences in their local markets will reap the rewards – not to mention the profits.

With so many brands, platforms and media competing for consumer attention these days, being merely ‘liked’ most certainly means being “out of sight, out of mind”. It’s essential to begin cultivating interactive social communities that love your brand and serve as brand ambassadors, facilitating engagement levels and bringing even more fans into the community, valuable fans – the kind that money can’t buy.

We weren’t surprised that ASOS tops the BrandLove25 forthe 2nd year running but it has been interesting to see several new brands appearing on the table this year. This time around we’ve kept a keen eye on growth and how social media has played a part in the year-on-year performance of the British digital brands that are out-performing this tough economy at a time when familiar high street chains are closing their doors on what seems like a daily basis.

Out of the 25 brands on the BrandLove25 league table this year, Missguided had the highest YOY growth of an impressive 380% and the majority of them grew more than 20% in the past year. After a closer look at some of the fastest growing brands on the BrandLove league table including Missguided, Wiggle, Boohoo and Secret Sales, we found that most of these fast growing brands, unlike the others on the table, are using YouTube and several of them are ‘early adopters’ of the popular emerging platforms Pinterest and Instagram.

In contrast, we were very interested to find that the brand on our league table with the smallest social community achieved the smallest amount of year-on-year growth. With the wide acceptance and acknowledgement of the importance of social media conversions to generate online sales, those brands who have not adapted their marketing plans are clearly beginning to suffer and may eventually render themselves irrelevant to consumers. Without the benefit of brand advocates in the social media space, there’s no way to compete for the patronage of potential customers who are influenced most through social media.

Though many brands on this table have higher revenue figures than the four mentioned above, their future survival will ultimately depend on maintaining high year-on-year revenue growth. Judging by what we’ve seen in our analysis, fast-growing brands like Missguided are gaining on them – and they’re using social media to do it.

Download the Infographic…

Britain’s pure-play digital brands use social media to turn in 27% YOY revenue growth is a post from: Tamar

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1.       Don’t be seduced. ROI should be targets and not promises. Even the more scientific of digital channels can’t guarantee ROI numbers. For this reason they should be realistic. It’s very easy for someone to write down a number and use it as a tool to justify more spend but ‘if it’s too good to be true…’.

2.       Bigger doesn’t mean better. I have seen on many occasions a larger revenue figure get usurped by a larger ROI.  For example, I had an instance recently when the ROI was 18.5x to deliver £1.35m OR an ROI of 17x to deliver £3.7m. Despite the fact we’re talking about almost tripling the revenue, the focus was still the ROI and the question was “why pay more when we can get a better ROI as we are?”. REVENUE is the key number here.

3.       The scales of ROI are complex i.e. if you halved the spend it’s likely the ROI won’t simply halve, similarly if you doubled it. The likelihood is that you’re not going to go for the first cost (and therefore ROI) that you’re presented with so when you negotiate your costs, don’t forget that the ROI algorithm will spit out something completely left field. There are online ROI calculators but I’m sceptical.

4.       Don’t translate ROI literally. Tamar achieve an average ROI of 18x for integrated SEO and Social campaigns but that doesn’t literally mean if you gave me £1 I could get you £18 back. (If I could I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog, I’d be on a yacht in St Tropez) there are minimum thresholds, as there are maximum thresholds or saturation points .

5.       Don’t exclude other channels that have a lesser ROI. Strangely, this seems to be less of a problem for brands i.e. brands will still invest an extortionate amount of money in PPC, when often, other channels like SEO will offer a much better ROI.  A balanced marketing mix is required with channels selected based on the revenue they can deliver and not the ROI they offer.

The above may seem fairly obvious but I think we all have fallen fain of ROI. Ultimately if you’re achieving a better ROI it would seem you’re getting a better deal but it might come at the expense of your bottom line.

Are you getting ROI or an RO’Lie’? is a post from: Tamar

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There are three main strategies that are available in optimising internationally:

• Option 1: New country-specific domains – hosting the international presences on entirely new domains i.e. www.xyz.ie or www.xyz.fr
• Option 2: Sub-folders – continuing to host in the current format, creating a different sub-folder for each different country required i.e. www.xyz.com/ie or www.xyz.com/fr
• Option 3: Sub-domains – hosting the different countries on sub-domains of the site, i.e. fr.xyz.com or ie.xyz.com

None of these options are exclusive. Each of the options/routes can also be combined with others. For example brands may choose country specific domains for some countries and then sub-folders and sub-domains for the others. And each of these options has pros and cons – for more details on these this piece Multi-regional and multilingual sites on Google Webmaster Tools is very useful.

This blog is going to focus on Option 2 because of its widespread use, which is down to its cost effectiveness and easy implementation. Let’s take a look at duplicate content and how interesting this option could become:

• If you use only 1 language – mainly English
• If you have added rel=canonical on the preferred version of the pages
• If your primary goal is to optimise for one of the territories, but with the knowledge that at some point you will want to optimise others too
• If you use /Europe or /Asia as sub-folders and not add a further country coded sub-folder say www.xyz/Europe/France.com
• If for a solution you have to choose between GWT settings, rel=alternate hreflang=’x’

Duplicate content:

If you are using a single language (say English) to target different countries with only minor currency-based changes on the pages then no matter which of the three options you chose you inherently create a ‘duplicate content’ scenario for yourself.

Duplicate content is obviously a problem you want to avoid – and also one that Google isn’t incredibly helpful about preventing. In an ideal, Google-powered, world every page would be unique. But as we all know, that’s not as simple as it sounds.

There are a lot of potential ways to solve or work-around duplicate content, but none of them are guaranteed – all sites are different, so a lot of it is best-guess work. And, like many things in SEO, you can’t ever predict the results until you test it out. So you have to find the best (and simplest) solution for your site before anything is put in place.

rel=canonical & rel=alternate hreflang=’x’

If your goal is to simply protect the rankings and search engine traffic for a preferred regional version of the pages at the detriment of the all others versions then adding a rel=canonical to the preferred (say, UK) version is the simplest solution.

However, if you are trying to optimise for one of the territories, but with the knowledge that at some point you will want to optimise others too, then you have to choose a solution which will allow you retain rel=canonical on your preferred version of the pages as well as provide you the flexibility to target other regions. This is where combining rel=canonical & rel=alternate hreflang=’x’ is very handy.

After implementing it Google knows about your ‘master’ or default version of the webpages and understands that the other variations in the URL are to be served only if the user is searching in that location.

GWT geo-targeting vs. rel=alternate hreflang=’x’

Brands are often quite hesitant to take the above solution to their web team simply because it’s a page-level rather than a site-level solution, which means it can be time-consuming and expensive. But, if the basics have been implemented by the web developers in the first place the SEO manager can simply use GWT and rel=canonical.

What are the basics?

If  www.xyz.com is your master website (with rel=canonical on each URLs) and you have properly set-up European versions of the website i.e. www.xyz.com/fr or www.xyz.com/de etc, then using GWT you can easily tackle duplicate content and geo-target at the same time.

However, if you have a region specific sub-folder say www.xyz.com/Europe and do not have country specific folders following the GWT route means it’s impossible to target all countries in that region as GWT geo-targeting only allows one country. One obvious solution to the latter would be to add a country specific sub-folder after /Europe say /Europe/Fr. However, this may lead to a massive 404 and 301 redirect situation as it would essentially have been a URL change.

Remember, as in so many things, planning ahead for SEO when planning a marketing strategy and building your sites and domains saves time and money later on. For international SEO, the solution that might seem more time-consuming/expensive at construction stage turns out to make life much simpler later on (unique ccTLDs and Unique content – no penalty, easy link building etc.). Conversely, the solution that’s much simpler to set-up properly in the first place (sub-folders/sub-domains) actually turns out to be much costlier later if it’s NOT implemented properly -  not just in terms of £s but, more importantly, in the incalculable cost you may pay in Google penalties due to your duplicate content.

International SEO and the perils of duplicate content is a post from: Tamar

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